Nothing here is private, but it is personal. So I keep it here instead of on urbanist.typepad.com, so that it won't freak out people who just want a nice article about cities or transit or plants.

01/23/2011

Your plan was to fly to the city of Z to spend New Years with your new partner L at his parents' home. L was there at the airport, so eager to see you. But you weren't on the plane.

L called you, then called friends, who told him to call the police in your town. Finally he did. They went to your home, and found your body there. It appeared that while home, alone, you had used crystal meth, and then did some things that are dangerous even when sober.

The obituary says you were born in 1970, so you were 40, but on the dating site where you met L, it says you're 38. Many gay men lie about their age, but why lie by just two years? A microfib, too small to matter, what does that say?

For so much of your life, you were wrong. You were the wrong person for your wife, for your job, maybe even for your parents. After all you'd been through, the long guilt-ridden breakup with your wife, salvaging a relationship with your daughters, casting about looking for a new focus, and finally falling in love with L, everyone wanted to believe you'd arrived, found confidence, could be happy now.

But once you've lived in a world where everyone tells you you're wrong, you can never again be totally sure that you're right. You meet new friends like me, a new partner like L, captivate us with your childlike eagerness to finally feel alive. But something's always off, a tiny displacement like two years on your age, like a sliding window that won't quite stay in its groove, and could pop out at any time.

I wish I had told you that this sensation of everything being a little bit wrong is an important insight in Buddhism. It's a thing that we must learn to live with. It's a fact about the world, not just about ourselves, and certainly not about you, gentle A.

I've never believed in any notion of heaven or afterlife, but have always called myself agnostic about that. Now, in this sensation of grieving while being angry at you, I realize that you cannot possibly still exist as a spirit. Because if you did, you would know what you've done to your friends, and to your young daughters, and to your parents, and to L, and the horror of that would destroy whatever remained of your soft, warm heart. If you existed anywhere, in any form, you would be in agony beyond anything you'd ever known in your difficult life. So I have to hope that there is no particle of you large enough to catch such sensations. I have to hope that you are truly and utterly gone.